Foreshadowing the Posthuman

Abstract

The crisis of humanism poses new questions to scholars, compelling them to redefine the category of “human” and consequently to reevaluate the epistemology that places man at the center of the entire gnoseological experience, as described in Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (22). One of the most important contributions to the discussion comes from Giorgio Agamben’s book The Open: Man and Animal. Starting from Linnaeus’s definition of the human being in his Systema (1735), Agamben claims that “Homo sapiens […] is neither a clearly defined species nor a substance; it is, rather, a machine or device for producing recognition of the human. […] Homo is a constitutively ‘anthropomorphous’ animal (that is, ‘resembling man,’ according to the term that Linnaeus constantly uses until the tenth edition of the Systema), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human” (26–27). In other words, for this Italian philosopher, the distinction between animal and human life is a kind of mobile frontier that is, above all, internal to man. This approach subverts the traditional logic of humanism and poses the question of the relationship between human and nonhuman beings in a new way.